At some points, Kerry implies that people who follow highly traditionalistic lifestyles — especially women in patriarchal subcultures — might nonetheless be trapped without any meaningful possibility of exit.

But it was traditionalistic business, if one considers the spirit which animated the entrepreneur: the traditional manner of life, the traditional rate of profit, the traditional amount of work, the traditional manner of regulating the relationships with labour, and the essentially traditional circle of customers and the manner of attracting new ones.

Ostensibly provoked by the local administration's decision to let a temple collapse as a new waterworks plant was constructed, the rioting crowd attacked not only the waterworks station (emblematic of the health and public works ethos versus traditionalistic understandings of the purity of water in the sacred pilgrimage site of Banaras), but also the railway station, the telegraph lines, and other forms of new technology.